Game Overview

Battlefield Heroes is the next Battlefield game in development by DICE in Stockholm, Sweden. The game is scheduled to be released in summer 2008 as an open beta. Battlefield Heroes is unique for a couple main reasons. The game will run under
the Play 4 Free model meaning the game is free to play and funded through advertisements on the game's website and on the start menu of the game. Advertisements will not be present in the maps. Another new feature is the introduction of micotransactions
(micropayments), which allow the player to purchase customization items for their character. Clothing items and other accessories will be available for a small fee, but nothing to give a player an advantage on the Battlefield. Since the game is of cartoon
style, the system requirements are quite low - 1Ghz CPU, 512 MB Ram, 64 MB Video Card, 500 MB HDD Space.

The Battlefield Heroes team rolled out a new update today with a brand new game mode, Capture the Flag. EA has been kind enough to provide us with 5 codes redeemable for 1,000 free BattleFunds. If you are interested in winning a code all you have to do is follow us on twitter (@BattlefieldNews) and retweet this news post. We will pick 5 winners tomorrow night (Tuesday, November 22nd).

Yes, what is indeed on its way to you all TODAY is an all new game mode that many of you may already be be firmly accustomed to... CAPTURE THE FLAG! And for those of you who aren't, hold on to your socks, because this is going to be a one wicked ride.

Starting off with Victory Village you can now enjoy a long standing favourite of the action game genre on your favourite Battlefield in this fast pace game mode that puts a little extra focus on teamwork. A good team will dominate, and a non-observant team will suffer defeat so make sure you gear up for battle and keep your eyes on the prize. Getting your enemy flag, and returning it to your base safely.

EA announced today that the classic Battlefield map, Wake Island (or "Wicked Wake" in BFH) is now available for Battlefield Heroes. A trailer and some screenshots can be found below.

Battlefield Heroes, the hit arcade shooter, is celebrating the game's second anniversary and surpassing of 8 million players worldwide by bringing Wake Island, one of the Battlefield franchise's most popular maps, to Battlefield Heroes.

Wake Island is a horse-shoe shaped fan favourite Battlefield map featuring bright landscape and plenty of tanks and planes to get players right into the action. The map is available now!

Famed hacker group LulzSec announced today they are done, but have released a farewell package. Included in this is 550,000 Battlefield Heroes Beta users' data. If you use the same password on Battlefield Heroes for any other site you might want to change it. Currently the Battlefield Heroes website is down pending an investigation into the leak.

LulzSec, the hacker group who have claimed responsibility for many of the high profile attacks on gaming companies, publishers, and even the CIA, have declared their work is done, their time is up, and they’re off. Apparently it was always intended to be a 50 day voyage aboard their Lulzboat, and it has come to an end. They believe they have revitalised the Antisec Movement, and entertained themselves along the way. Which they claim, albeit in hindsight, was always their goal. But whatever their reasons, their goodbye comes with perhaps their biggest release of data yet. It’s going to be messy. This one contains 550,000 Battlefield Heroes Beta users’ details, and the details of 50,000 users from “random gaming forums”.

You can see the full list of what’s released in this farewell below, but the ones to worry about are if you’re registered on the Battlefield Heroes beta, registered to Hackforums.net, or one of the 50,000 who have been picked up from whichever gaming forums they went after. If you’re worried, just reset your passwords immediately, and if you’ve been so daft as to use the same password elsewhere, for goodness sake go change them anywhere important. Read the rest...

Battlefield Podcast is back again this week with a new episode talking mainly about Battlefield Play4Free among other news in the Battlefield community.

We’ve got half of a new panel this week as we are joined by Senior European Correspondent Chris and Central North American Contributor Shawn. After we go through the last week’s news, the opinions are flying as we rip into Battlefield Play 4 Free! Warning: Some harsh opinions may be presented during this episode.

But that's not all. You will also find "Easter Egg widgets" and also in-game missions where you need to drop and hide a certain amount of eggs before your enemy finds them all and does the mean thing of stamping on them!

All joking aside today, Easy Studios Ben Cousins tweeted a couple days ago that he will be leaving EA's Easy Studios, which shares offices with DICE. Cousins was the driving force behind many of EA's free to play titles including Battlefield Heroes, Battlefield Play4Free as well as Lord of Ultima and Battleforge. Cousins has not said what he plans to move onto next, but we wish him the best of luck!

Update: Gamesutra reports that Oskar Burman will now lead EA's Play4Free team at Easy.

General manager of free-to-play division makes a shock departure from publisher

Ben Cousins, the man behind EA's successful forays into the free-to-play games market, has announced his departure from the publisher.

In a brief statement issued on Twitter last night Cousins stated: "Battlefield Play4Free launches this week and it's time for me to leave EA. Very proud of what I've achieved in the last 4 years."

Cousins was also the mastermind behind free-to-play pioneer Battlefield Heroes, which to date boasts around 7m users.

The exec departs having recently made his mark in the industry via his fierce advocation of emerging games models and his dismissal of the traditional market.

“I can’t think of anything more exploitative than gating all of your content behind having to pay someone $60," he stated just last week. "That’s a really harsh business model if you think about it objectively."

At the London Games Conference last November Cousins predicted that Battlefield Free2Play could be the turning point for the traditional market.

“There's an opportunity in the next two to five years to cause a significant disruption to the traditional triple-A console market," he asserted. "I want someone considering buying a game on a Microsoft console to think 'but these games are free over here’.”

Games On Net posted a video interview with Easy Studio's Ben Cousins speaking about Battlefield Play4Free.

During EA's recent San Fran Battlefield event, we caught up with Ben Cousins, General Manager on Battlefield Play4Free. During our chat about this promising freebie, Ben shared an important learning from their Battlefield Heroes experiment - turns out he thinks there's no such thing as a casual shooter fan. Watch the video to see what he means, as well as whether Battlefield Play4Free will require constant microtransactions to remain competitive.

Mozilla Firefox 4 was released today, which brings many new improvements including a new interface. Firefox also has the ability to skin the browser with what they call a Persona. There are actually a whole lot of Battlefield styles to choose from such as this new Battlefield 3 persona. Check out all the Battlefield personas here. Thanks Gamm4.

Cousins: I’m sort of split between two locations, as we have a team near Stockholm and a team near Frankfurt in Germany. We concentrate on making free-to-play games for the EA Games label, so that’s Battlefield Heroes, Battlefield Play4Free (just about to go into beta!), and then we have a couple of strategy games, Lord of Ultima, and one called Battleforge.

RPS: So let’s talk about the Battlefield games. What’s the background to the development of Battlefield Play4Free?

Cousins: So Battlefield Heroes had been going about a year and a half when we started doing our first concept work on Play4Free. We looked at Battlefield Heroes and we had a proven model there – we’d learned how to do free-to-play shooters in the Western world with that title. It’s going really well! But we were aware that the cartoon presentation that we’d given the game gave it a…. well, not /limited/ audience, because seven million registrations is an awful lot, but it wasn’t going to break out to become a huge breakout mainstream hit. I think that’s partly because some people feel that a mix of cartoony and first-person shooter is a bit strange. Read the rest...